Podcasts by GreenLeaders DChttp://greenleadersdc.com
Digital media and education services supporting business and government in the sustainability space.Tue, 05 Sep 2017 12:33:22 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.8http://greenleadersdc.com/food-policy-the-role-of-small-farms-organic-water-energy-sustainability/Food Policy: The Role of Small Farmshttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/224818404/0/podcastsgreenleadersdc~Food-Policy-The-Role-of-Small-Farms/
Sun, 01 Jun 2014 08:00:31 +0000http://greenleadersdc.com/?p=2982Food policy development and legislation has traditionally been dominated by agribusiness, but what impact will a surge of interest in small-scale farming have?

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Food policy development and legislation has traditionally been dominated by agribusiness, but what impact will a surge of interest in small-scale farming have?

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e spoke with Environmental Working Group’s Scott Faber on agriculture policy and the impact of small-scale farming on sustainability.

GreenLeaders DC: In the U.S., there has been a surge in locally based food production, particularly organic. What’s driving this and what does it mean for smaller, local farmers?

Scott Faber: Consumers have never been more interested in our food choices. We want to know not simply what’s in our food, but who made it, where it was made, and how it was made. We’re really in an unparalleled era of food democracy and the explosive growth of organic is just one part of that. People also want to get to know the people behind the food we eat and what impact that has on our health. More people recognize that food is medicine and that what we eat has enormous impacts on the cost of health care and health outcomes overall. For these reasons, I think there’s a big opportunity for farmers to market directly to consumers, which ultimately helps farmers retain more of the income through localized food production and distribution. But at the end of the day, the desire of consumers to know more about their food will have impacts regardless of at what scale the food is produced – whether its large or small farms, local or global. And that will favor farmers that adopt sustainable and organic practices.

GreenLeaders DC: What does this surge mean in policy terms? Is legislation supportive of this movement?

Scott Faber: I believe the farm bill was really a missed opportunity, but I also think that as more and more people become more interested in how their food is grown and demand a place at the table, as trillion dollar bills like the farm bill are written, it’s inevitable that you’ll see a shift in some of the decisions that are being made. One big challenge is awareness of the multiple impacts that agriculture has. More people are more concerned about their health and see the connection with food. But I don’t think a lot of people have really made the connection between how our food is grown and the related impacts on other factors like species extinction, air quality, pesticide use, and many other factors. You’ll see more awareness in the coming years as people increasingly buy organic and more voices are heard about the way we produce food now, and what some the more sustainable alternatives are.

Organic farming at this point is not so much a political movement, but a social shift. Today, it’s never been easier in our history to build a healthy diet. In an average supermarket you have about 40,000 different food choices. So increased awareness about how food is made along with all these choices is driving a lot of the consumer decision making at the point of sale. Whether that social movement turns into a political movement is still hard to tell. One thing we’re doing here is keeping track of legislators’ votes on food-related policy. We believe this will help people make voting decisions based on whether a legislator is supportive of our food values and help develop political capital around organic farming.

GreenLeaders DC: What is the future outlook for the small-scale agriculture space? What challenges do they face?

Scott Faber: I think in general there will be more demand for smaller, localized farming. One challenge those groups face is that they have yet to develop a political voice in Washington, DC. And while they do have great champions like Congresswoman Chellie Pingree or Senator Sherrod Brown, they haven’t yet developed enough political capital to cause big shifts in how the trillion dollars in the farm bill is allocated every five years. There’s another challenge in that small and local doesn’t necessarily mean sustainable. So it’s important that those small farmers be able to take steps and demonstrate that they are using less fertilizer, reducing runoff, and other things so they can protect the integrity of the organic brand.

GreenLeaders DC: Demography is also an issue for agriculture. How do you see population shifts affecting farming?

Scott Faber: This is an interesting issue and it remains to be seen how it will impact the development of farming. According to the latest census the average age of a farmer continued to rise. But on the flip side, there are more and more young people, minorities, and women getting into agriculture than at any time in modern history. So the face of farming is shifting at the entry point.

Organic farming at this point is not so much a political movement, but a social shift. Today, it’s never been easier in our history to build a healthy diet.

GreenLeaders DC: There have been some media reports of professionals and other non-traditional farmers going into organic agriculture as a way to “get back to the land”. Is this a trend?

Scott Faber: I think probably you have in every generation a certain number of people who reject city living and decide to go and be farmers. I’m not sure if that’s happening more or less than it used to, but I do get the sense that consumers are more and more educated about their food choices. This is something that’s been tested and we can really demonstrate. Consumers are not just looking at the facts panel on what they’re buying, but are really asking who made this, how was it made, and what’s in it, in a way they never have before. And that’s very exciting.

GreenLeaders DC: How much of an impact can innovative approaches to farming, such as rooftop gardens and urban farming, make on how we source and consume food?

Scott Faber: Whether or not urban farming, rooftop gardens, and other approaches to agriculture will have a significant impact – that’s something we’ll just have to wait and see. Right now, we import a lot of the food that we buy and that’s a good thing. Other places can produce food more cheaply than we can and overall it contributes to the choice we have and hence to a more balanced and healthy diet. But because we source our food literally from all over the world, it’s important that we have standards in place to ensure that, wherever the food comes from, it’s produced in a sustainable manner. Those are some of the big, important, global choices we need to make.

About Scott Faber

Vice President of Government Affairs, Environmental Working Group

Scott Faber leads a team working to improve food and farm legislation, chemicals policy and a host of other issues important to EWG and its supporters. Prior to joining EWG, Scott was vice president for federal affairs for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, where he spearheaded efforts to enact the Food Safety Modernization Act, which sets new food safety standards for food manufacturers and farmers. From 2000 to 2007, he was a food and farm policy campaign manager for the Environmental Defense Fund, leading efforts to reform farm policies in the 2002 and 2008 farm bills. From 1993 to 2000, Scott was a senior director for public policy for American Rivers. A native of Massachusetts, Scott holds a J.D. From Georgetown University Law Center and lives in Washington, D.C.

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Worldwide, an astounding 30-50% of food goes to the landfill every year. Achieving food security requires the reduction of food and natural capital waste.

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n our previous conversation on food security, Dr. Tim Fox discussed the importance of the food-water-energy nexus. According to Dr. Fox, food could well be the defining sustainability challenge of the 21st Century as emerging market populations grow and shift away from grain-based diets to a preference for animal-based foods.

Yet at the moment, societies produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet and could even feed larger populations. To accomplish this, the serious issue of food wastage requires urgent attention. It’s estimated that between 30-50% of all food produced ends up being rejected, lost, or thrown away along with the natural capital – water, energy and land – used for food production.

For more on this, we once again spoke with Dr. Fox.

GreenLeaders DC: Waste is another key aspect of food security. What is the scale of food wastage?

Tim Fox: Food wastage is a serious issue and has an important role in environmental degradation and risk, in which climate change potentially plays a big part. As the global population increases and dietary preferences move towards animal-based from plant-based diets, addressing food wastage will in large part determine if we reach our sustainability goals. Right now, every year, we produce around four billion tons of food globally and adequately feed around six billion people on somewhere between a half and two-thirds of that production. And I say six billion because around one billion people go to bed hungry every night. So feeding another three-four billion should be plausible without massive increases in food production. The key is to reduce food wastage by tackling waste in the mature developed countries of the world and loss in the infrastructure of developing economies.

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GreenLeaders DC: Where is all this food being wasted?

Tim Fox: Food waste is really a consumer-driven issue. That’s not to say that some food isn’t lost in the distribution systems of mature economies, because that does occur to some degree. But consumer cultures in places like the U.S., U.K., EU and other developed nations are the real drivers of waste. There are three main elements to the problem. One is retailer practices, two is consumer behaviour, and three is the culture of the hospitality industry. Retailer issues include sales promotions like buy one get one free, etc. that encourage over consumption. Another is the use of confusing sell-by dates. Then you have crop rejections. Here in the UK, for example, around 20-30 percent of the perishable crop, so that’s fruit and vegetables, is rejected in the field because it’s not the right size, color, or shape. And the supermarket contracts are such that the farmer is not able to sell that produce on through local markets or other outlets. So that food, and the water, energy, and land – the natural capital – that went into producing it is wasted. Overall, about 40% of the food in developed economies ends up as landfill. When you combine that with food waste that goes to other disposal routes, and losses in the infrastructure of the developing world, you end up with an estimate of between 30-50% of food being wastage on a global scale.

GreenLeaders DC: How can this food waste challenge be addressed?

Tim Fox: Well, there’s a very tight relationship between the consumer and the retailer. In the case of crop rejections for example, the retailers have a perception that consumers will not accept anything short of “perfect” produce in terms of color, size, etc. And the consumers are constantly being told that they want this perfect produce at all times. But the reality is that consumers in many cases would be comfortable with less-than-perfect product depending on what they’re going to use it for. So there’s a bit of a disconnect between what consumers are willing to buy and what retailers are selling. It’s a vicious circle that can be turned into a virtuous circle if we had an open and honest dialogue between these two groups. We’ve done some work on this at the Institution and in a survey we found that 80% of the British public were prepared to but what we might call “ugly” fruit and vegetables.

GreenLeaders DC: What can be done from the consumer side?

Tim Fox: This is very important area because consumer behavior also drives a lot of this waste. Something like 30-50% of the food that makes it into the home ends up in the trash bin. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that many consumers don’t consciously plan their food purchases. Their lack of a menu plan for the week, for instance, leads to increased vulnerability to retailer sales promotion and often results in that over-purchasing we spoke about earlier. Making a simple plan would reduce that risk and lead to a more efficient use of the food that they do buy. Another reason is that when consumers get the product home, often it’s stored in less than perfect conditions, it starts to deteriorate, and consumers don’t know what to do with it. And that last point is interesting because it illustrates a lack of culinary skills in many households. Even though that food may no longer be pristine, often times it is still perfectly usable in any number of ways, like making soup for example. So there is a responsibility both on the retail and consumer side to increase awareness on what can be done with the food that is currently going to waste.

About Dr. Tim Fox

Head of Energy and Environment, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London, United Kingdom

Dr. Tim Fox is responsible for developing the Institution’s thinking on energy, environment and sustainability issues. His role also includes communicating this through thought-leadership reports, public speaking engagements, national and international press and broadcast media appearances and by providing input to government policy making both nationally and internationally. He was lead author on the Institution’s recent groundbreaking report “Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not” which galvanized world attention on the issue of food waste and food loss across the supply chain from field to stomach. Tim has a wide range of research and engineering practice experience gained in many industrial sectors and has worked for commercial enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions in the UK, Australia, Canada and The Netherlands. He is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Environmentalist as well as a Fellow of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Society of Arts.

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http://greenleadersdc.com/food-security-the-food-water-energy-nexus-sustainability-organic-cleantech/Food Security: The Food Water Energy Nexushttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/224818408/0/podcastsgreenleadersdc~Food-Security-The-Food-Water-Energy-Nexus/
Tue, 01 Apr 2014 08:00:42 +0000http://greenleadersdc.com/?p=2660Food security is the defining issue of the 21st Century. There’s no better way to illustrate systemic impacts than to look at the food-water-energy nexus.

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Food security is the defining issue of the 21st Century. There’s no better way to illustrate systemic impacts than to look at the food-water-energy nexus.

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ustainability has often been called a “systemic” issue that requires “holistic” thinking to address. Wrapping one’s head around the complexities of climate, energy, and a range of other topics can be challenging to say the least. But making those connections is a key part to understanding how to approach sustainability as an ecological, economic, and social concept.

Here in the U.S. and in other developed countries, most of the population doesn’t share that basic concern. Nevertheless, so-called rich economies still have real cause to be concerned about food security. The challenge isn’t only about having enough food. It includes the way that food is produced and how wisely we use it.

To help us get a grip on food security and why it’s an issue for both developed and emerging economies, we spoke with Dr. Tim Fox. Dr. Fox is Head of Energy and Environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in London.

GreenLeaders DC: When most people hear the term food security, they think the issue is having enough food. Is there more to this issue?

Tim Fox: Food security is partly about having enough food to avoid hunger, but there’s much more to it than that. There’s also aspects of politics, economics, social science, engineering, agricultural science, and increasingly climate science. It also depends on whether you look at it from a local community, national or an international level. From an individual and community level, it’s really about a route out of poverty. Historically, no group of people has ever successfully moved along the development path without connecting farmers to markets. Moving from subsistence farming to some sort of agricultural production system is a key vehicle for development. At the national level, food security is about guaranteeing the stability of the state and supporting development through things like infrastructure, transportation for food distribution, communications, and global participation. Internationally, it’s about reducing geopolitical tensions. If we have sustainable local food production and food imports, that leads to a more stable international system centered on global trade in food.

GreenLeaders DC: Food security is a very interdisciplinary issue. What are some of the other economic activities impacted by food production and distribution?

Tim Fox: Absolutely, food impacts many economic sectors. If you think beyond the direct need for food, there’s a much broader relationship between food, water, energy, and the land that have gone into food production. On top of that, because of this food-water-energy-land nexus, food wastage has a particular bearing. When food is wasted or lost in the food system, not only is the food not reducing hunger directly, but the water, energy and land – the natural capital that went into producing that food – is also wasted. So there are very strong connections between food security and water, energy, and land security.

GreenLeaders DC: You approach food security from the engineering perspective. What kind of challenges does this water-energy-land nexus pose for you?

Tim Fox: As engineers we’re consistently called upon to deliver ever-increasing amounts of water and energy in a sustainable way and to improve our land stewardship capabilities in a world of increased competition for natural resources. So as natural capital comes under increasing pressure and tensions emerge around that, engineering is under extreme pressure to deliver solutions not only for food, but also for other human endeavors.

GreenLeaders DC: We live in a globalized world where much of the food we buy is shipped from far away. To what extent does food security depend on transportation networks?

Tim Fox: What we’re talking about here is really the issue of resilience from the local all the way to the global scale. I think its important to recognize the reality that in the 21st Century we’re in a world that’s highly interconnected and we have globalized food production and distribution systems that are deeply embedded. These systems represent significant past and current investments in assets and transportation is a key component of that. Plus, connecting local farmers with market options both locally and internationally is very important to move communities along the development path, especially in emerging economies. The challenge is to do that without recreating a fossil fuel based infrastructure in the developing world. I think it’s crucial to do two things. First, there needs to be a transition in the developed world from the current fossil fuel hungry infrastructure. Second, we need to establish a sustainable and resilient infrastructure based on clean technologies in emerging markets from the beginning. With a clean tech approach those markets can “leap-frog” over the fossil fuel dependence stage.

GreenLeaders DC: Resilience is a hot topic in many developed country policy circles these days mainly due to impacts of severe weather. How does resilience play a role in emerging markets?

Tim Fox: Yes, and we really have a unique opportunity to improve global resilience at this point in time. The bulk of 21st Century population growth will occur in sub-Saharan Africa and to some extent in Southeast Asia. Right now, many of those African countries do not have a fossil fuel based infrastructure in place. The opportunity exists to access clean technology, particularly in energy, in a way that achieves resilience by taking advantage of cost parity in an off-grid scenario. There is a need to retrofit some of the existing infrastructure, but the important thing is to ensure that future development is based on clean technologies. All of the technologies that would allow these economies to move forward on what I call a clean tech “leap frog” are in existence today. From a manufacturing and deployment perspective, many of these technologies have already reached cost parity with a fossil fuel based infrastructure, especially when you factor in issues like future competitive tensions around sources of diesel for example, translating into a risk of diesel shortages and higher costs. If you’re sitting right now in a sub-Saharan African village several hundred miles from the nearest energy infrastructure, and you need reliable energy for development, applying clean technologies around solar power makes a lot of sense. Putting that in place relative to bringing a centralized energy infrastructure to that location is much less of an environmental and commercial risk. The outcome is more resilience to power cuts and fuel shortages that are a severe burden on development.

From a manufacturing and deployment perspective, many clean technologies have already reached cost parity with a fossil fuel based infrastructure, especially when you factor in issues like future competitive tensions around sources of diesel – translating into a risk of diesel shortages and higher costs.

GreenLeaders DC: In the United States, there’s a significant organic and local farming movement underway. What impact does small-scale farming have on issues like community resilience?

Tim Fox: To begin, it’s important to realize that a balance needs to be struck between building resilient communities around small-scale farms and enabling those farms to connect to trading opportunities in the global marketplace. What we really need is a holistic system that includes both dimensions. Ideally we’d have an efficient global system with many opportunities for trade along with resilient communities that can function independently when there are failures at the global trading level. So in the developed world, where communities can make a transition and make use of local food and energy sources, that helps build greater resilience through the system as a whole. It’s crucial to transition older communities and build new communities on the latest clean technologies. And it’s not just clean tech; social connectivity and communications technologies are also a large part of achieving that resilience.

GreenLeaders DC: You say that the technologies to establish a resilient, sustainable infrastructure already exist. What are the challenges to actually putting it in place?

Tim Fox: There are two things that are absolutely crucial. One is access to appropriate finance mechanisms. The second is empowering communities through land tenure. Ensuring that farmers have title to their land means that they have a stake in caring for it. They are incentivized to put sustainable stewardship practices in place. It basically means they have a long-term commitment. On the finance side, it’s crucial to put in place the financial and investment system that will enable communities to put a clean tech based physical infrastructure in place. The aid donors, development institutions, NGOs, and others have an important role to play here as intermediaries to help communities access and use these finance facilities. If we can successfully address those two challenges, it will have a very positive impact for all.

About Dr. Tim Fox

Head of Energy and Environment, Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London, United Kingdom

Dr. Tim Fox is responsible for developing the Institution’s thinking on energy, environment and sustainability issues. His role also includes communicating this through thought-leadership reports, public speaking engagements, national and international press and broadcast media appearances and by providing input to government policy making both nationally and internationally. He was lead author on the Institution’s recent groundbreaking report “Global Food: Waste Not, Want Not” which galvanized world attention on the issue of food waste and food loss across the supply chain from field to stomach. Tim has a wide range of research and engineering practice experience gained in many industrial sectors and has worked for commercial enterprises, government agencies and educational institutions in the UK, Australia, Canada and The Netherlands. He is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Environmentalist as well as a Fellow of both the Institution of Mechanical Engineers and the Royal Society of Arts.

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http://greenleadersdc.com/organic-food-local-and-national-views-farming-policy-education-sustainability/Organic Food: Local and National Viewshttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/224818410/0/podcastsgreenleadersdc~Organic-Food-Local-and-National-Views/
Sat, 01 Feb 2014 08:00:58 +0000http://greenleadersdc.com/?p=2652How do local farms and national organic farming policy relate to each other? Listen to our podcasts with Calleva and the Organic Trade Association.

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How do local farms and national organic farming policy relate to each other? Listen to our podcasts with Calleva and the Organic Trade Association.

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oday we explore organic farming from two perspectives. First, we hear a national, policy-focused perspective from the Organic Trade Association. Second, we follow up on our recent visit to Calleva with a local, on-the-ground viewpoint of the organic farming business and experience.

Laura Batcha

Executive Director, Organic Trade Association
Laura tells us about the organic farming industry’s unique approach to regulation and policy, why education is an ongoing effort for organic, and how the notion of value plays a key role in this fast-growing sector.

Read the transcript:

All of our members understand that their businesses rely on the consumer having trust and confidence in the seal when they see it on the product or they see it at the farm. We are a group that has chosen to be regulated through the organic standards. Most people will often think of trade associations as their main portfolio being to limit regulation. Our main charge as a trade association is to protect the integrity of the organic standards, and I think that there’s quite a lot of cynicism from the public at large around government and also what they see on packages, and it’s all tied to the trend about knowing more where your food comes from and being able to have confidence in that.

We see in our research a trend towards the fastest growing portion of folks consuming organic are young and new entrants to the market. So there’s a lot of very promising trends in the demographic. So we have a standard that has a lot of inherent attributes to it that require explaining and educating to the public about how do you farm without pesticides, the fact that antibiotics are never allowed in livestock production, GMO’s have been prohibited since 1990, all these things.

Most people will often think of trade associations as their main portfolio being to limit regulation. Our main charge as a trade association is to protect the integrity of the organic standards.

As a sector, we will never get to the point where everybody’s educated and there’s no more need. It’s an inherent part of what we have to do. Price is still a big barrier for folks, and there’s a lot of people out there that have to work hard to manage their budgets. That has to be understood. We like to communicate about value more than just price. When you talk about value for organic, that brings in all the ideas of the externalities and the cost not only to perhaps your health and your family’s health, the public health, but the environment and to all those derivative costs from an unsustainable agriculture and food production system.

But it also talks about the choices that you can make within organic so it can meet your budget. Often times, people can make organic work within their budget comparative to choosing non-organic foods, even without having to wrap your mind around all the externalities. We did a recent piece of work with a chef and a price survey where we designed a menu plan where you could feed a family of four 100% organic on $25 a day, including animal protein in the meals. So it can be done if you’re creative, plus you get all the benefits of the derivative savings in terms of the externalities.

Matt Markoff

Executive Director, Calleva
Matt tells us about the local business side of organic farming, how farmers can think creatively about their role in the community, and why organic farming education can be a powerful sustainability experience.

Read the transcript:

Land is money. And you have to have land to farm. And that’s just the hard reality. It’s a huge expense to get up and going. There was Farming at Metro’s Edge meeting not that long ago, and there’s a new guy that lived in Chevy Chase and quit his job, and he’s now one of the first dairy farms to open up in Maryland in I don’t know how many years, where this used to be a heavy dairy area. In fact, the farmer who farms our land, he grew up as a dairy farmer. And they’re just not here anymore.

There’s another farm that’s right down the road from us, and there were three buddies from Virginia Tech that decided we’re going to get in the farming business. And they farmed their parents’ land and now they have a business that’s up and going off of farming. So it kind of gives you hope that there’s all these ways. Now there’s programs in place to lease to young farmers and groups to come and get a couple acres and care for the land. So there’s a lot more creative opportunity that legislation is putting through to help the farmer get up on its feet. And that is what’s exciting.

Having a farm, working the farm, and performing good labor is just so healthy. They can understand the work and the need for the work. It’s a beautiful experience to use our bodies and hands, and being connected with dirt. Dirt’s awesome!

I enjoy coming at farming a little bit different. We come at it from an educational standpoint. And I think there’s a lot of ways for farmers to farm and do something else – to think what works for their community, what works for their environment, what the land tells them to do. All the time we walk around and ask “what does the land want here?”. And you get that idea. Especially with the ag reserve that we’re in, we have this area that’s protected for agriculture. It’s impressive and you just want it to continue to thrive and not get torn up and torn apart.

When we go out and we do an experience for kids or adults or anything like that, it’s connecting them with nature. And one of the hard connections, I think that we felt growing up, was that you had the industrial farmer, and then everybody else and you didn’t really have that small farm connection. At least I didn’t feel that as much. And is that important? Yes. And I think now, it’s unbelievable. Every grocery store you go into, they are are making that connection from the farmer to the produce that they’re getting, and that’s huge. Especially in this area, the DC area, there’s this huge awareness of where your food is coming from. The movies and the documentaries are coming out. We realize that we have to connect that. We can be an environmentalist and say “don’t use this” but we also have to eat food, and so it’s solving all these pieces of the puzzle. It makes it very intriguing to us, non-traditional farmers.

Within our DNA is that need to understand where the things that we put into our body are coming from and how it all works. Understanding our role in this world. All of these things are connected. And that’s the fun thing about farming. It’s just so unbelievable to get in there, pick something from the ground, clean it, prepare it, and eat it. I think it’s something that, long ago everybody had that experience, and now very few people get, and when you can get that it’s primal. it’s like touching your soul. It’s a beautiful experience.

It’s an experience that I think every kid needs for sure. That hands-on approach is how we learn and how we grow as individuals. We have to be hands-on. Having a farm and working the farm, and performing good labor, is just so healthy. A lot of times, and I remember growing up, you had a job and you didn’t really understand why you were doing it. But here, the outcomes are very obvious. It’s a complete connection of what they’re trying to get out of it, and what they’re doing. They can understand the work and the need for the work. And work is so healthy, it really is. You know, using our bodies and using our hands, and being connected with dirt. Dirt’s awesome!

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Clean energy development requires regional investment approaches where local citizens and officials are the key to creating resilient, prosperous economies.

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f you follow sustainability issues, you could be forgiven for thinking that policy debates about climate change, energy, and the economy are essentially national or global in nature. And to judge by the policy results of large, international negotiating foray, you might conclude that little progress is being made. While it is true that sustainability concerns are international, citizens in individual communities inevitably feel the impacts at the local level.

In the United States, local citizens and their elected representatives – city councils, mayors, and governors – are in many ways on the leading edge of creating sustainable, prosperous economies. Real initiatives are underway in many municipalities and regions to address energy security and climate resilience in conjunction with economic development and job creation. To learn more about why regions are a key part of creating opportunity in a sustainable economy, we recently spoke with Andre Pettigrew, Executive Director of Clean Economy Solutions. Clean Economy Solutions focuses on bringing metro regions, businesses, investors, and markets together to grow the clean economy through real business transactions and practical economic development strategy.

GreenLeaders DC: What are the advantages of approaching green economic development from a regional perspective?

Andre Pettigrew: I think there are three basic advantages. First, the main reason why regional approaches to sustainability and the advanced energy economy make sense is that the movement is driven by business. When you’re thinking about advanced energy markets, for businesses these markets are more regional than they are local. They’re looking at how to develop a critical mass of market share. For example, if you’re trying to develop solar or wind capacity, you don’t do that city by city but rather you want to do that within a region and a state. I think another reason why we take this regional approach is that the supply chains are often regional. The communities who want to compete in this advanced energy economy are working very hard to make sure that they have a full range of assets – service providers, manufactured products, and other things – that are necessary to support the major producers of clean energy in their community. And finally, the labor market is regional. No one city or community has all the labor that’s needed, and so these companies are looking to source labor on a regional basis. And I’ll add that a regional approach is self-organizing. Metro regions aren’t just defined based on the statistical metropolitan standard areas anymore. These areas ebb and flow. A lot of our inner cities have lost populations over the last decade to the exurbs, but now that’s reversing itself.

GreenLeaders DC: You say regions are self-organizing. What are the bases for that self-organization?

Andre Pettigrew: First of all, the definition of regions really depends on energy sourcing. A traditional way of describing regions is by geography – northeast, southwest, etc. As it relates to the advanced energy economy in terms of energy production, research organizations like the NRELs (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) have done analyses of where the wind blows most efficiently and where the sun shines the most. And so energy-sourcing regions are being developed based on those patterns. For example, the northeast and the eastern seaboard all the way from Maine to North Carolina are looking to take advantage of offshore wind because that’s where the wind blows. We’ve also seen the region in the central United States from Iowa up to the foothills of the Rockies including Colorado and Kansas taking advantage of the wind that blows in that great basin. In Arizona, New Mexico, California, and Nevada, the sun shines hot and bright in these desert regions. Plus, in those areas they have the landmass to put up the large solar arrays to harvest that energy on a large scale. So regions are organizing around the resource and where the available assets come together to present a real opportunity for scaling and production efficiency.

GreenLeaders DC: How would you describe the economic development and job-related drivers behind these regions’ embrace of advanced energy industries?

Andre Pettigrew: It’s mix of factors. The regions that we’ve been working in are traditionally known as metro regions. These are the city centers and the adjoining communities that make up a region. Over the last five years what we’ve seen is, first, communities were hard-hit by the Great Recession. Second, in part as a reaction to the economic downturn, there’s a focus on what’s the next opportunity. How do we become more resilient in response to this downturn? With our programs, initially a lot of folks were suspicious of “green” because they weren’t sure what that really meant. But through our programs, communities are now understanding that green, sustainability, and advanced energy economy means much more than promoting a vertical industry. On one hand, the sustainability or green reference is about clean technology companies. Those are businesses that make solar batteries, wind turbines, and other products. That’s a vertical industry we call Cleantech. These are usually small, emerging companies that aren’t big players yet but they’re important for these communities because they’re working on the new set of services and technologies that will usher in what I would call a new sustainable business practice. These products and services will enable our traditional industries, whether its retail, manufacturing, or construction, to be more energy efficient, more resource efficient, and thus cleaner. As community leaders come to understand that the cleantech green is more a horizontal industry than a vertical industry due to these enabling products and services, they’ve developed a greater interest in it. I’ve spent 30+ years in the economic development space in various roles and responsibilities, and you are always looking for ways to attract investment, develop new markets, and grow existing markets in your community. When we talk about green or sustainability, I think what may have started out as something nice to do has developed into something that’s important to do because it’s generating innovation, investment, new markets, and more efficient businesses.

GreenLeaders DC: Are regions also looking at ways to manage risk?

Andre Pettigrew: I know that climate change is one of the areas of controversy in our country politically, but from a business standpoint, I think one could say that now, today, saving the planet, i.e. mitigating climate change, makes dollars and sense. It may have always made sense from an environmental standpoint because we don’t have a Planet B, and we need to figure out how to be more resource efficient and mitigate those impacts. But we have to acknowledge that in particular over the last five years, major corporations, small innovative companies, and public entities understand this movement of sustainability from a risk perspective. They’re also looking at climate change through the lens of economic opportunity and new markets. That’s been the powerful thing that has driven the interest in metro regions all over the country to take a harder and stronger look at these types of initiatives and programs.

What you’re seeing in cities and at the state and local level is a much more pragmatic response to climate change as an economic opportunity and a political opportunity. They absolutely want to mitigate the negative impacts.

GreenLeaders DC:Recently in the press, there’s been a lot of focus on the B Corp movement. Is the notion of companies earning their social license to operate for real? How does your organization’s regional approach fit into that?

Andre Pettigrew: The conversation surrounding sustainability has evolved. We’ve gone from “green” to “sustainability” and now to “resiliency”. They’re all relevant and important. To me, this movement is about behavioral change. That’s saying that people and the businesses they run want to be more resource efficient. That includes energy, water, land, and people. We’ve always kind of expounded that, but I really think the Great Recession woke up a number of folks in this country in terms of how we approach this change. I believe this movement now has deep and long legs because there are structural changes happening in our economy. First of all, the rich may have gotten richer, but the middle and the poor have not. Communities are going to have to continue to find ways to employ people, land, and available resources that much more efficiently. From a policy standpoint, I think mayors and governors get this better than Congress people, Senators, and Presidents. And the reason is that they’re on Main Street. They have to get things done. So what you’re seeing in cities and at the state and local level is a much more pragmatic response to climate change as an economic opportunity and a political opportunity. They absolutely want to mitigate the negative impacts. Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina are perfect examples. As mayors and governors have seen that play out, they want to build some resiliency in. And as you build that resiliency in, you’ve got to create opportunities for your citizens who are there. They’re committed to the community and they want to stay there. Public-private partnerships are a big part of that commitment to rebuild and expand opportunities. For example, economic developers recognize that the products and services from some of the emerging cleantech companies will be employed not only in their local community, but will also be sold nationally and globally. So its important to pay attention to these types of regional companies, universities, and research organizations because they will be exporting products and services all over the world and importing dollars back into the community. So this really is a sea change. With respect to corporate America, we’re always concerned about “green-washing”, but if you look at where some of the investments are being made, you can see the commitment. Those companies are trying to learn and do this better and more effectively. We’re on the right path.

GreenLeaders DC: How would you characterize the financing challenges in these regional advanced energy markets?

Andre Pettigrew: The financing challenge is significant and complex. I’ve come to the conclusion that in the U.S., we don’t have a money or financial availability problem, we have a distribution and prioritization problem. Here’s what I mean by that. There is 1.8 trillion dollars cash on Corporate America’s balance sheet. That’s money – liquid cash assets – that is on the bench and looking to be deployed. So how do you get that type of money off the bench and into the field of play? That’s part of the challenge in every community. When you talk to investors, whether they’re venture capital or equity investors, they’re always in a chase for quality investments. Now I’ve heard that there’s a lot of money out there, but there aren’t a lot of quality deals. Now especially with regards to the renewable energy sector, the investments continue to grow. But venture capital investment declined in 2012. Part of that had to do with no exits through IPOs and/or acquisitions. Investors want an exit as fast as, let’s say, some of the Internet and technology companies of the past. They’re still looking for investments that generate these sorts of returns. But the renewable energy sector is still just emerging and thus very risky. There are technology and market risks, which investors are pretty good at assessing. Where they’ve had the most difficulty in the energy sector is assessing political risk. Energy is a different animal as opposed to Internet technologies in that there’s still no single national energy policy. Each state has at least one public utilities commission that’s setting energy policy and rates. That creates a high level of uncertainty. At the federal level, a lot of the public policy initiatives such as tax credits for wind and solar are very short term. That’s inconsistent with the types of infrastructure investments that have to be made. Returns from those types of high-level investments come in over time. If you have public policies that don’t support that longer time frame, it makes capital formation that much more difficult. That may be the bad news. The good news is that we have seen a number of large corporations acting as strategic investors. They’ve been acquiring some the emerging technology companies who have wrung out a lot of the risk through product development, they’ve defined the market niches, and that’s helped mitigate the effects of a lack of venture capital.

Younger generations are the key because they will simply demand cleaner air, efficiency, and more accountability from companies on these issues. They’re growing up in a world where they know it’s possible to achieve these things.

GreenLeaders DC: Energy security is a crucial part of the economy. In addition to their roles as strategic investors, what other ways are large companies playing a role in the development of the energy sector?

Andre Pettigrew: There are companies like Apple, Google, and Wal-Mart for that matter, who are very much looking for energy independence and they want that power to be clean. For example, many state-level renewable energy portfolio policies stipulate that 20-30 percent of power must be generated from renewables. But many of these companies have said they’re looking to generate 100% of their power from renewables. So in my mind, these companies are going to drive innovation. From the utilities’ viewpoint, that can either be perceived as a threat or an opportunity. The business models must evolve to deal with the possibility of increased distributed power generation. One of the issues is that utilities still have to maintain the grid. If you have large companies or residences that are generating their own power, the question is how do you make an equitable cost or price assessment for this activity. What those models will look like is still an open question. Distributed power generation as a research project has been around for probably 20 years. But at no time in the past were there major customers like a Google or an Amazon who were calling for it. Now these companies are calling for it. That’s forcing regulated utilities, which have to recover their costs and guarantee shareholders a return on investment, to respond. The models they used in the past are kind of being blown up. Despite that uncertainty, there are some clear trends. For example, no one is arguing that the electrical grid in the U.S. doesn’t need to be updated. Everyone agrees on that. There’s a consensus that hundreds of billions of dollars are going to be invested in upgrading the grid system. New energy and efficiency technologies such as smart metering are definitely going to be a big part of that investment.

GreenLeaders DC: You said earlier that you think the sustainability movement has deep and long legs, and there appears to be a convergence of many factors to support an optimistic view on advanced, renewable, and distributed energy investments going forward. Why do you think these trends will continue to build?

Andre Pettigrew: I think we’re in the beginning of a transition that will redefine how business is conducted in the U.S. and the world. People are using more renewable energy. They’re using more of it and they want more of it. As the capacity of advanced energy systems based on renewables increases, the demand to utilize that will increase. This will drive additional investment and business opportunities. I think these are fundamental trends and I don’t see them falling off. The energy efficient economy – with things like efficient lighting, vehicles, green supply chains – will drive demand not only from consumers but from businesses who are looking to capture additional savings and efficiency in their operations. Finally, I would say that newer (younger) generations, anyone born after the baby boomers, are the key because they will simply demand cleaner air, efficiency, and more accountability from companies on these issues. These younger generations are growing up in a world where they know it’s possible to achieve these things. Just 20-30 years ago, that wasn’t the case. But now, renewable energy, smart meters, and social technologies have created a new mindset, especially among younger populations.

About Andre Pettigrew

Executive Director of Clean Economy Solutions

Andre Pettigrew is the Executive Director of Clean Economy Solutions a nonprofit clean-economy accelerator for metro regions, helping them maximize their existing clean economy opportunity, envision how it could grow, and chart a roadmap for getting there. Mr. Pettigrew is responsible for the strategic management and development of the organization. Pettigrew was formerly the Executive Director of the Office of Economic Development for the city and county of Denver under former Mayor John Hickenlooper (now Governor of Colorado).

During his tenure the City launched the “Greener Denver Business” program, an economic development strategy in support of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s “Greenprint Denver” climate action program. Under Pettigrew’s leadership OED played a major role in supporting renewable energy companies interested in expanding to Denver. He also played a role in recruiting two world class German manufacturing companies — SMA Solar and Repower— which opened major facilities in Denver creating over 700 manufacturing jobs.

He is a member of the US Chamber’s Environmental Innovation Network. Pettigrew serves on the national sustainability advisory board for KB Home, a national home builder and the technical advisory committee for the US Green Building Council’s STAR Community Index. He is currently a fellow at Massachusetts’ Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Pettigrew received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Los Angeles and graduated from the State and Local Government Senior Executive Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

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http://greenleadersdc.com/sustainable-health-a-personal-approach/Sustainable Health: A Personal Approachhttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/224818414/0/podcastsgreenleadersdc~Sustainable-Health-A-Personal-Approach/
Sun, 01 Dec 2013 08:00:39 +0000http://greenleadersdc.com/?p=3998Living a healthy life begins with basic reality: you are what you eat. Today we we hear an integrated health perspective rooted in sustainability.

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Living a healthy life begins with basic reality: you are what you eat. Today we we hear an integrated health perspective rooted in sustainability.

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ealth care in America has dominated the news every since the rollout of the Affordable Care Act (aka: Obamacare) on October 1st. The bungled launch of healthcare.gov is, in a way, a fitting metaphor for the state of health care in general. At the root of any consideration of health reform has to be this question: how can the United States spend so much on health care and achieve such mediocre outcomes (when measured against other rich countries)?

To answer that question, it’s necessary to acknowledge a fundamental contradiction. In the U.S., two major industries – food and health care – almost seem to talk past each other, as if one does not have an impact on the other. Taxpayers subsidize crops like corn and sugar while treatment for epidemics such as cancer, obesity, and heart disease (so-called “diseases of affluence”) continue to burden the health system. Watch any prime time television show and you’re likely to see commercials for fat-laden hamburgers followed by advertisements for the latest pharmaceuticals.

Living a healthy life – free of disease, full of energy, and able to seize opportunities – begins with recognizing a basic reality: you are what you eat. In this interview, we hear an integrated perspective from a personal sustainability expert. Antoine Chevalier is a former international development professional, having worked in sub-Saharan Africa on sustainability modeling for developing countries. During his time with CIRAD (Centre International pour la Recherche et l’Agronomie et le Dévelopement), he decided to make a career shift to focus on sustainability from a personal viewpoint.

We spoke to him about his personal experience – from development professional to sustainability coach, about health care, and how the symbiosis of body and mind plays a foundational role in maintaining health and achieving true personal sustainability.

GreenLeaders DC: Antoine, when you started out professionally, your career followed a more traditional path, one that many professionals might say you were crazy to give up. Tell us about your background.

Antoine Chevalier: I was doing my PhD thesis on geography and economy in developing countries. I was in southern Africa at the time. I was creating a model that would couple geographical information systems with multi agent systems that would predict how a landscape would look in the future. I had everything a person could want in order to succeed in that space – working as part of a PhD program at the prestigious Sorbonne University in Paris and published scientific articles. My work had been presented and profiled overseas; I had a guaranteed 125,000 euros annual salary right after the PhD program; and the chance to travel worldwide to help people achieve a more sustainable way of life. Yet I wasn’t happy. I was having issues sleeping at night. Something was telling me that to achieve true sustainability for the human race, the answers were within myself, at the personal level.

GreenLeaders DC: How did you come to the realization that the answers were within and what does that mean?

Antoine Chevalier: It was during a meditation group that I discovered my inner wisdom and guidance. That led me to the realization that I am a healer, not an economist, and to achieve true sustainability is to heal humans – not working with computers. It is through spiritual realization and self-empowerment that we can reach true personal sustainability, and as an extension of that create real and lasting change.

GreenLeaders DC: How did you start practicing personal sustainability?

Antoine Chevalier: I started practicing meditation twice a day – first thing every morning for 10-15 minutes, and then at the end of the day right before sleeping for another 10-15 minutes. I gradually stopped consuming alcohol, caffeine, tobacco, sugar, and changed to an organic vegetarian diet. I then took that further and became vegan, then raw vegan, and I’m now 90% raw liquid vegan. Following that, my health skyrocketed. Given how environmentally unsustainable the meat and dairy industries are, and how meat and dairy consumption is personally unhealthy, I felt a genuine sense of true sustainability. I became and remain physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually centered and grounded. The last time I was sick was in 2002. At the age of 35, I started triathlons. I am now 40 and I’m in the best shape of my life, by far.

GreenLeaders DC: Your professional life now is dedicated to helping others achieve personal sustainability as a physical therapist, holistic nutritional counselor, and spiritual healer. What is one of the biggest challenges you see with your clients?

Antoine Chevalier: In my practice, I see many people with chronic ailments. It’s very obvious they’re suffering. Often these people go to see doctors where the doctors run tests and diagnose the ailments. And often times those tests come back “normal”. But the body has an innate intelligence – it sends subtle signals and messages to us. So despite all the tests and diagnoses, these people still feel that’s something’s wrong. The typical response is, well, please give me a pill, doc. But the pills don’t solve the deeper problem. No pill, no lab test, no diagnosis, no vaccine can solve the problem. I had this experience myself, and my work focuses on connecting people to the integrated physical and spiritual reality of personal health.

The body has an innate intelligence – it sends subtle signals and messages to us. My work focuses on connecting people to the integrated physical and spiritual reality of personal health.

GreenLeaders DC: You say the body has an intelligence of its own. What do you mean by that?

Antoine Chevalier: The human body is incredible at self-healing. In fact, it’s brilliant, fascinating in this way. Here’s what it does: it speaks to us in very subtle ways, almost like a whisper, if you like. If we ignore those whispers, the body will eventually start to yell to get our attention. Millions of people in this country ignore their bodies’ whispers. There are chronic health epidemics of all sorts, like obesity, cancer, heart disease, and the list goes on. Despite the vast sums spent on research and healthcare, modern medicine has no idea what to do with all these ailments. It’s very frustrating for a lot of these people because they continue to feel fatigued; they’re anxious and depressed. They toss and turn at night. To use an analogy, if you plant a garden in soil that’s polluted, what kind of harvest will you get? Every successful organic gardener knows that you start by preparing the soil with nutrients and you maintain it with care in order to get the desired results. It’s an integrated system that responds positively if you follow nature’s rules. The same logic applies to the human body. The body is like a garden. You reap what you sow.

GreenLeaders DC: Healthcare is a huge issue in this country in many ways – economically and socially. How would you characterize the health profession’s response to these epidemics?

Antoine Chevalier: In a big way, the health care profession’s current approach, which relies on medicine and “fixing” problems, has it all backwards. The reality is that the body does not shape how we live our lives. The body is actually a mirror of how we live our lives. Everyone can relate to that statement if they reflect and think about it. Think about a time in your life when things were out of balance. When you knew deep down that the situation was wrong for you. For example, that could be a time when you were in the wrong relationship, or you were in some hostile work environment. Or any other situation where you felt spiritually disconnected. At these times, the body often sends you certain messages – whispers – such as little physical symptoms. The body is trying to tell you something. Many people simply ignore these messages because they’re doing what they’re “supposed” to be doing. The medical profession has a singular approach that focuses on the physical. But the body and mind are one. They interact and impact each other. A truly sustainable path, personally, is to put both in harmony with each other.

GreenLeaders DC: This seems to be the interdisciplinary approach to personal health. But can personal sustainability go beyond that and have, for example, social or even financial impacts?

Antoine Chevalier: Absolutely. I can definitely say that’s true from my own experience. I bought a small electric car. With tax rebates, the price was about $14,500. That’s fairly typical for a car, but there’s no emission inspection, no oil change, no gas expenses. Compared to a Honda Civic, if I drive 7,000 miles a year, I save roughly $5,000 annually. After three years, the car becomes an investment. Many people may not want to embrace personal sustainability for health reasons. But one of the best ways to think about it is in financial terms. It’s incredibly expensive to be chronically ill in the United States. Personal sustainability is about reducing risk – to your health and your personal finances. So if someone doesn’t want to be sustainable for health or environmental reasons, maybe they should do it for the money. Also, it’s no accident that personal sustainability shares many attributes with sustainability at a community and even global level. Just as eating red meat every day increases your risk of heart disease, burning fossil fuels increases the risk of climate change. To use an analogy, Typhoon Haiyan that recently ripped through the Philippines is the global equivalent of someone having a stroke. Both are cases where the body, or the planet in the case of Haiyan, is yelling at us to put things in balance.

ith a length of about 200 miles, the Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States. It occupies a special place in American culture. When English settlers such as Captain John Smith arrived in the area in the early 1600’s, they described it as a Garden of Eden; a place where “Heaven and earth have never agreed better to frame a place for man’s habitation”. It was in this area where the American Revolution and the Civil War were fought. The Bay has provided livelihoods for millions of people over the years, sustaining generations of oystermen and crabbers.

Today, the Chesapeake watershed is the subject of an intense restoration effort. The ecosystem hit its low point during the 1960’s – President Lyndon Johnson famously described the Potomac River as a “national disgrace” – as commercially important rockfish, crab, and oyster populations plummeted. The Federal government and regional state governments decided that something needed to be done. In 1983, a partnership was formed – the Chesapeake Bay Program – to begin the long road back to a healthy bay.

The effort presents unique challenges politically, economically, environmentally, and socially to those charged with restoring the bay. With a population density that puts enormous pressure on water resources, balancing economic growth, pollution reduction, and improving ecosystem health requires an inclusive approach that engages a range of stakeholders. Part of that approach is valuing ecosystem services in the restoration plan.

Recently we spoke with Rich Batiuk, Associate Director for Science, Analysis and Implementation at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Chesapeake Bay Program Office in Annapolis, Maryland. Rich has been working on Chesapeake Bay restoration for almost 30 years. We asked him about the program’s progress, challenges, and how ecosystem services are taking a role in meeting the intertwined needs of economies, citizens, and the ecosystem.

GreenLeaders DC: Since 1983, there have been many reports on the health of the Chesapeake Bay and its restoration. Many of those reports detail conflict between stakeholders and a lack of progress. Is that true and how would you characterize the program’s development to this point?

Rich Batiuk: It’s been an evolution. When we started in 1983, it was Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the District of Columbia, the EPA, and the Chesapeake Bay Commission. We didn’t have all six states and the District of Columbia involved at that point. New York, West Virginia, and Delaware, eventually came on as partners as well in 2001. Also, back then we had 12 million people in the watershed. Now we’re coming up on 18 million people. The partnership evolved from essentially a one-page agreement between different stakeholders to work together to what it is today. And it’s an ongoing evolution – the conclusion has not been written.

GreenLeaders DC: Are you making progress?

Rich Batiuk: We saw the Chesapeake Bay in the 60’s and 70’s impacting local economies. We were losing the rockfish industry, oysters were certainly on the downturn, people couldn’t swim in the bay, etc. Have we solved all the problems in the last 30 years? No, but it is a different ecosystem from what it was back in 1983. In 1985 when I came on, you could almost walk across the Potomac on top of the algal scums. Since then, the rockfish have come back, crab populations have stabilized, we have thousands of more acres of underwater bay grasses, many streams and rivers across the watershed have cleaner waters, and we’ve reduced the amount of nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment pollution flowing into the Bay’s tidal waters.

GreenLeaders DC: What are some of the core challenges in developing an ecosystem services valuation methodology for the Chesapeake watershed?

Rich Batiuk: There was really nowhere else in the country and even in the world, with the exception of some places in Europe, where they figured out how to manage increasing human populations, development of the surrounding watershed, and agricultural production, and restore and maintain clean water. In the Chesapeake, we were at the same time seeking to roll back the amount of pollution and bring back ecosystem services not seen since the 40’s and 50’s. It’s a challenging process because there are humans involved with a range of interests and priorities. In that context we produced a series of agreements that said we needed to clean up the water, and here’s what we think is necessary to do that. In practice that means specifying the level of pollutants and algal blooms that were allowable to achieve our water quality goals for good oxygen and clearer waters. Those guidelines are the basis for the Total Maximum Daily Load, or TMDL – what we call the bay pollution diet. As I said earlier, it’s been an evolution of how we got six states, the District, the federal government, and over 1,800 localities to work collectively for clean waters their own backyards, their local streams and rivers, and their downstream neighbors.

GreenLeaders DC: What are the standard criteria for identifying and measuring ecosystem services?

Rich Batiuk: For years, we have valued what I would call our common currencies across the Chesapeake watershed. Just like the Euro is a common currency for a number of European nations, in the Chesapeake one of our common currencies is a measure of the pounds of pollution reduced as a result of a particular practice, like planting cover crops or running water through a wastewater treatment facility. But until recently, a key missing element was that we didn’t describe the wider benefits, beyond clean water, of some of these actions. For example, when you put a forested riparian buffer in place, it has a pollution reduction benefit, but it also has an ecological benefit. Being a fisherman and kayaker, I notice when you have a forest right along a stream or rivers, the fishing is usually good along those areas—cooler temperatures, shade, and good in-stream habitat all make for good fish habitat. So now we’re building into this common currency a qualification of ecosystem benefits, in addition to measures of pollutant load reductions, water quality response, and cost analyses for particular practices.

GreenLeaders DC: How much of your effort to value ecosystem services is subject to localized conditions?

Rich Batiuk: That’s a key question. How do you get a diverse group of stakeholders to make shared decisions? In the Chesapeake Bay partnership, we have state, federal, and local governments, the business community, community groups – all of whom have different challenges, values, and priorities. In this area, there’s a long history of different value systems and even political systems. The future is also a big factor. With our projected population growth, aspects such as land use planning is also impacted at the local level. We’re at 18 million people now and the projections say we’ll get another 1.5 million people every decade. And the population growth is occurring not right along the coastline, but in this secondary space which includes former farmlands and forested lands. That has a double-whammy effect because you’re taking out natural water filtration capacity and replacing it with hard surfaces which don’t allow infiltration of rainwater and, hence, more sources of nonpoint pollution. Millions of people now and in the future will get their drinking water from the watershed and use it for recreation. Among all the stakeholders, there’s a recognition that we all something of value that is in our common interest to restore and protect.

GreenLeaders DC: You deal with a lot of scientific, engineering, and technical data. What are the challenges in developing an ecosystem services model to make it practical for such a diverse group of stakeholders?

Rich Batiuk: Operationalizing ecosystem services, making them practical, and incorporating them into the everyday decision-making processes is still a new concept. Data availability is an important factor; ecosystem services are highly dependent on available data to develop the actual quantifiers. And then putting a dollar value on a benefit can be a challenge. For instance, how do you value someone’s enjoyment of the watershed for recreational or spiritual purposes? Plus, because ecosystem services are an interface of many disciplines – biological sciences, environment, policy, economics, social sciences – it makes for a very complex picture when determining what a particular resource is really worth. The key in making ecosystem services practical is getting to a certain level of quantification so we can make reliable comparisons between policy options, particularly as applied at the very local scale.

GreenLeaders DC: Can you give an example of how ecosystem services valuation works in practice?

Rich Batiuk: Let’s consider oysters. There are several levels of ecosystem services they provide. First of all, oysters provide a food provision service that easy to quantify. You can harvest them and get a dockside price for oysters on the half shell, in a soup, etc. Going beyond that, you can look at the filtration capacity of a certain number of oysters and compare that figure to the equivalent amount of wastewater treatment capacity that would be necessary to filter the same amount of water. That’s something our Partnership’s Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee is working on. From a practical standpoint, it’s sort of like the aquatic equivalent of carbon sequestration. You can have a situation where people say, if I bring those oysters back, I might be able to trade them from a nutrient perspective. In other words, you can put those oysters in water and be paid based on the filtration benefits that the oysters provide, as opposed to expanding a water treatment plant that provides that same water filtration service. Going even further, oysters also have a heritage, community, and historical value in the Chesapeake area. How do you put a value on the ability of local citizens to make a living by fishing, tonging for oysters, or crabbing, beyond what they bring to the local economy? That’s harder to put a value on. Even further, the physical presence of oysters in underwater aquatic reefs provide habitat on a number of species. Again, how does what put a value on housing for the ecosystem.

GreenLeaders DC: How does your work interact with efforts on climate change resilience and adaptation?

Rich Batiuk: Certainly our state-level colleagues who work on climate change mitigation and adaptive management have a strong interest in our work, especially given that we have 10,000 miles of shoreline in the Chesapeake Bay alone. During Hurricane Isabel, one of our counties was 80% underwater. There’s a lot of low-lying areas and marshlands around here. In terms of wetlands’ impact on storm surge protection, that’s certainly an aspect of our work that has direct relevance to climate change adaptation. As for others, more advanced levels of ecosystem services, the direct relevance is not so obvious. Having said that, the agricultural sector, the wastewater managers, and the municipalities are all paying attention to our work because it helps them make more-informed decisions on many issues, including how to mitigate risk from climate change. These communities are all looking at how they can get multiple uses out of their tax dollars. The smarter approaches don’t look at climate change, infrastructure build-out, stormwater protection, and drinking water provision as separate issues. Instead, they thinking about how they can package those things together for comprehensive solutions which are more efficient and save money. Our quantification tools help managers compare options to make those decisions.

GreenLeaders DC: The Chesapeake Bay watershed is massive and policy measures can impact millions of people. What are the key elements of a successful multi-stakeholder model in this context?

Rich Batiuk: Making sure that all stakeholders have a seat at the table is definitely a key. The format for shared decision-making which we have developed and refined over the past three decades is also important for us. One of the decision-making processes we’ve had in place for 25 years now is how to identify best management practices and their effectiveness in reducing impacts on the Bay. Part of that process is an agreed procedure on how science gets brought together. All the stakeholders have agreed to that framework. And that forms the basis for accrediting farmers, municipalities, and others who are doing the work to reduce negative impacts on the Bay.

We are now working on bringing more advanced levels of quantified ecosystem services into that shared decision-making process. So, for example, when we place a value on an ecosystem service and all stakeholders agree on, say, the value of a wetland in flood mitigation or as habitat for migratory birds, then we can bring that quantified value into the process alongside other criteria. That quantification is the basis for the shared currency that is recognized across the watershed. For it to work, all stakeholders need to agree on the process, the application of sound science principles, and the accreditation procedures.

Incorporating ecosystem services into everyday decision-making processes is still a new concept. How do you value someone’s enjoyment of the watershed for recreational or spiritual purposes? The key is quantification to ensure reliable comparisons between policy options.

GreenLeaders DC: Your work mainly focuses on the water quality side of the Chesapeake Bay program. Can you give an illustration of how far you’ve come in achieving the partnership’s goals?

Rich Batiuk: Certainly one of the areas I’ve observed over time is the evolution of how we handle wastewater from municipal sources. In the 80’s we were dealing with many issues that needed decisions: whether or not to limit nitrogen and phosphorous, how much should we limit them, etc. In some cases we had not raw sewage, but some very basic treatments for sewage which then flowed into the rivers and the ecosystem. We were just figuring out how to put all the infrastructure in place to make that work for citizens who were paying their utility bills every month.

If we go forward 30 years to the present day, we will have 478 wastewater treatment plants in place by 2015 with advanced pollutant removal systems across the watershed. And that will be the norm. So given the technology availability, the number of stakeholders, and the regulatory frameworks, we’ve gone from having very basic water treatment to some of the most advanced treatment facilities in the world. It’s been this evolution over time that involved policy, engineering, finance, environmental, and social aspects.

The Potomac during that time has come from, like I said, being a national embarrassment where you could walk across the algal scum, to now, where we have national bass tournaments right outside the nation’s capital. For bass fishing, in fact, there’s some of the best underwater grasses anywhere along the east coast right in the D.C. area. Every five years the Department of Interior puts out a survey of outdoor recreation, and in the 2011 report you see that just in Maryland alone, the economic value of fishing and wildlife watching is over a billion dollars. That just shows how much people really value these natural areas and the role that ecosystem health plays in a prosperous economy. Being able to include and internalize those benefits into decision-making processes will put us far along the path to a truly restored Chesapeake Bay.

About Rich Batiuk

Rich has worked at the Chesapeake Bay Program for more than 25 years, leading the integration of science into multi-partner decision-making. He is responsible for providing state-of-the-science environmental monitoring, multi-media modeling, distributed data and information management, and technical data analysis and interpretation to the partnership. He is also leading efforts to use the Chesapeake Bay Total Maximum Daily Load, or pollution diet, to help state and local partners accelerate their on-the-ground reduction of nutrient and sediment pollution.

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New green building certifications are going beyond traditional criteria using biomimicry principles and regenerative design to create living buildings.

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ince 1993, green building design has generally been defined by the LEED standard. But the concepts of ecosystem services, natural design, and biomimicry are now challenging developers to put natural principles into practice. Today, we take a look at the building sector with an organization that’s taking green building certification to a new level with the concept of natural design to create living buildings. To learn more, we spoke with the International Living Future Institute’s Outreach Director Kay Kosa and Washington DC architectural designer Cory Estep.

Background

Climate resiliency and adaptation is a key concept now for businesses and governments dealing with the threat of natural disasters from extreme weather and how to manage the related risks. The principles of natural design, ecosystem services, and natural capital are ways to put resiliency into action. Whether it’s a building design, a business model, or a community infrastructure plan, the act of working with nature rather than against it is increasingly seen as a wise planning decision and a good investment.

How do we use natural design principles in a practical way to develop resilience in buildings? Some groups are going beyond the traditional definitions of green building and moving into what is called regenerative design.

At the International Living Future Institute, the Living Building Challenge asks building designers to develop structures through the process of biomimicry. The concept of biomimicry essentially follows nature’s design solutions. Biomimicry recognizes that over billions of years of evolution, nature has performed, in its own way, unprecedented research and development on the best way to achieve energy and resource efficiency. This vast reservoir of natural intelligence offered by the animal and plant kingdoms is seen as a resource to be emulated.

About the International Living Future Institute

The International Living Future Institute offers green building and infrastructure solutions that move across scales (from single room renovations to neighborhoods or whole cities). The Institute offers global strategies for lasting sustainability, partnering with local communities to create grounded and relevant solutions, and reaching out to individuals to unleash their imagination and innovation.

Through the Living Building Challenge and other programs, the Institute has helped to redefine the green building movement, substantially raising the bar for true sustainability. By embracing the psychology of the endgame, the Institute strives to identify the most direct path to a future in which all life can thrive. They seek partnerships with leaders in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors in pursuit of a future that is socially just, culturally rich and ecologically restorative.

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http://greenleadersdc.com/social-investment-green-community-hubs/Social Investment: Green Community Hubshttps://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/224818420/0/podcastsgreenleadersdc~Social-Investment-Green-Community-Hubs/
Tue, 01 Oct 2013 08:00:10 +0000http://greenleadersdc.com/?p=4030Sustainability is a global issue, but social investment programs conceived and implemented at the local level often have the most important impacts.

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Sustainability is a global issue, but social investment programs conceived and implemented at the local level often have the most important impacts.

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oday we talk with Dave Feldman of Bethesda Green, a community-focused sustainability group that’s combining grassroots action with an entrepreneurial approach. Listen as we discuss green business incubators, partnership building, and European vs. U.S. approaches to sustainability.

About Dave Feldman

CEO and Co-founder of The Livability Project

Dave is CEO and Co-founder of The Livability Project, providing the tools and guidance needed for local business, government and community leaders to accelerate the adoption of sustainable entrepreneurship, business, and living practices. Dave is a coalition builder, strategic thinker and sustainability thought leader furthering the goals of regional sustainable and economic development for long-term community improvement. He brings knowledge and experience from business, government and the not-for-profit sector together to create real solutions that create livable communities.

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Green architecture is a key part of building sustainability and resilience into cities. Innovative sustainability design programs are meeting the challenge.

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oday, our conversation with Christopher Grech of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. CUA is home to an innovative green architecture program. Christopher Grech is Director of the Masters of Science in Sustainable Design program at CUA’s School of Architecture and Planning. We talked with Chris about a range of topics related to green buildings, including the teaching methods and purpose behind a leading sustainable design program.

Read the podcast transcript here:

Narrator: Today on the GreenLeaders DC podcast: our conversation with Christopher Grech of the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. We’ll discuss the teaching methods, activities, and purpose behind one of nation’s leading sustainable design programs.

Christopher Grech is Director of the Masters of Science in Sustainable Design program at the School of Architecture and Planning at Washington DC’s Catholic University of America. We talked with Chris about a range of topics. We started with the basics of Catholic University’s sustainable design program.

Christopher Grech: We have two programs. One is in sustainable design; the other is city and regional planning. That is a program that looks at cities – it’s a larger scale initiative. Whereas the MSSD would look at individual buildings, the MCRP looks what happens when you go a scale up from the buildings. So how do buildings work with each other, how do buildings create cities and regions and infrastructure that’s required and it’s a mixture of design and policy, too. It’s looking at things from an urban design but also maybe from the legislative, policy point of view.

Narrator: Sustainability, of course, is a slippery concept. It means different things to different people. And it’s full of potential contradictions. Many of us, as citizens, for example, may be committed environmentalists by recycling or consuming only organic food. But we also might be investing our retirement savings in a mutual fund, which holds shares of oil and coal companies. Our retirement savings depend on those companies doing well. There seems to be no single, silver bullet for achieving sustainability.

Christopher Grech: I agree absolutely – I think that’s the case. And let me explain first that we tackle sustainability on at least two levels here. One is we obviously offer the Masters of Science in Sustainable Design program, which I would say is a fairly high level, but we’ve also introduced an introduction to sustainability course for our students. It’s a requirement at the sophomore level. All our students will get this course. It’s a three credit hour, core semester course. And I’ve divided it in my mind into three sections. One is some theory about sustainability, which includes ethics and how that influences us on a daily basis, not necessarily as architects or designers. The second third is some of the more practical aspects about climate change, what we can do as architects and then the last third, I ask practitioners to come in and talk about how they apply sustainability. We’re not just hearing from architects. There are contractors, even lobbyists that we try and get people in to give the students as broad a perspective as possible on sustainability. And what I do at that course is I stress to the students that there are two levels that they can make a difference in terms of sustainability. One is a personal level, and the other is a professional level. And I think before you even get to the professional level, you have to understand sustainability on a personal level. So, in addition to all the sort of lectures and presentations by outsiders, three are two important assignments. One is to take an everyday process and analyze that and see what the implications are say of brushing your teeth, do you leave the faucet on all the time, what kind of toothpaste do you use. That’s the first thing and then later in the semester, the second assignment is: what’s your carbon footprint – just in a very basic way to try and calculate that and then estimate how the students can actually reduce that. So I think once they get that idea of how as individuals that they can make those adjustments, they can then try to understand professionally what impact they can make and I think as professionals, they can make a huge impact.

Ten years ago, people looked at you wondering what you were talking about when you mentioned sustainability. Now I think that it means something to everyone. I think we’re well placed in DC for our graduates to find employment but more importantly applications for the knowledge that they’ve gained here.

Narrator: One question we raised with Chris is how the program addresses the wide-ranging subject matter that sustainability touches on. Even within the single discipline of architecture, tackling green building would seem to require a holistic approach.

Christopher Grech: It’s as holistic as one person or small group of people can make it and I try to address that by inviting a number of people in to speak in not just the introduction to sustainability course, but the whole program. We’re very keen to offer a wide variety of electives that tries to deal with the holistic nature of sustainability. We have a course in integrated coastal management, we’re offering courses in affordable housing, I’m developing courses in environmental law, and even hopefully workplace psychology. These are things that really excite me – we’re not just thinking about architecture. We’re taking a much broader view. Sustainability is not just about energy or materials, and it’s not just about architects.

Narrator: So if the program is not just about architecture, how does the program combine all these different elements, and still give students the specific skills they need to graduate and then perform as professionals. Thinking about that, we dug a little deeper into the details of the courses.

Christopher Grech: We take a look at energy that goes into acquiring the materials and making the products, the architectural building products, and we also take a look at life cycle analysis. And that has to do with not just energy, but resource depletion, air pollution, water pollution. Now we deal with these on a fairly basic level, at the introduction to sustainability course, but we deal with it in much more detail in the MSSD program.

Narrator: We also asked how students gain the hands-on experience to prepare them for working in the field.

Christopher Grech: I think the most hands on sequence of courses, are the energy modeling and simulation. Because apart from the theory of understanding how the software works, its about going to buildings and assessing how much energy they use and trying to model that, predict it and model it. So I think that affords an opportunity to actually go to the buildings, to assess them, and then test that assessment against the computer model. And I think it’s important to question the efficacy of a computer model and to try and get data that either proves or disproves some of the assumptions that we’re making. And this might be a bit controversial, but we make a lot of predictions about LEED buildings, but I don’t think enough work has been done to evaluate how successful they are with those things. I would hope that as we grow as a program that we will be in a position to do some of that post-occupancy evaluation to assess how accurate those predictions were.

Narrator: Once the students graduate, they’re off to practice their skills gained in the program. And as with any industry, sustainable building architects confront a range of challenges in their professions. What are those challenges and how do they affect practicing architects and their clients? For example, buildings are a huge consumer of energy in this country.

Christopher Grech: That’s probably the aspect that would have the most effect. You know it depends on which particular consultant or component that the design team or the construction team you’re talking about. The client’s concern is most cases is related to cost and so there’s always sort of backwards and forwards in how cost effective is putting in this amount of insulation or this amount of glazing, etc. And architects have to try and have a feel for both the technology and the cost effectiveness. It’s a question that we come back to many times. There are some institutions that don’t want to spend the additional money up-front to go through the certification process, and that’s a big problem. The way that commercial development happens here, the costs associated with construction really have to be recouped in a much shorter time than say in Europe, so developers take a very short-term perspective here, in Europe it’s slightly longer. And we talk about embodied energy and there’s embodied energy of the building materials, but there’s also the recurring embodied energy, which is how much energy you use to maintain the building. And after about 25 years, the recurring embodied energy becomes significantly more than the initial embodied energy so if a client had to take a long-term view of the building performance, 25-50 years down the line, small adjustments or increases in capital expenditure early on will reap huge dividends in the long term. And we hope that more clients will take that kind of view.

Narrator: Because buildings are such large consumers of energy, they are also large sources of greenhouse gas emissions. For this and other reasons, many companies across all industries have embraced sustainability. We asked Chris about this and the suggestion that green building is a new field with huge commercial possibilities.

Christopher Grech: It’s a huge field but I think there some are dangers too at the same time, and that’s the sort of “greenwashing” thing and how much of it is a marketing exercise. You see a lot of ads on TV that make things out to be really green, and that’s just not the case. From a personal point of view, I was born and brought up in Malta. Malta is an island community and it tries to be as self sufficient as possible. And partly because my parents were teenagers in the Second World War; they are quite frugal, you know it’s always switch the lights out when you leave the room, and finish what’s on your plate, etc. And so I think I’ve come from a sort of culture that, one of your questions is given that green that green building is a relatively new field. It’s not. What’s new is the way that we waste energy and I think we’re trying to redress that problem now. Something’s gone awry, and that’s the cheapness, the inexpensiveness of fuel that has allowed us to squander it.

Narrator: While the practice of green architecture has been around for some time, the idea of offering an academic degree based on the concept is relatively new. So how is the program developing? And more importantly, how is the community and students reacting to this program?

Christopher Grech: It’s interesting, because we were very conscious in coming up with this program; there isn’t really a precedent or a track record. I think that especially now that we’re talking increasingly about green-collar jobs and opportunities, etc. I think we’re well placed in DC for our graduates to find employment but more importantly applications for the knowledge that they’ve gained here. One of the best bits of information we got is that the information that they’re learned certainly about energy modeling and simulation, they’re actually been able to use directly either to help inform the design team or even to better communicate with their consultants. Ten years ago before the LEED rating really took on; people looked at you wondering what you were talking about when you mentioned sustainability. Now I think that it means something to everyone.

Narrator: We asked Chris more about the student experience at the program and how they’re able to contribute to its development.

Christopher Grech: I think taking a lead from the student comments, the fact that they’re learning information that is directly applicable, I think there’s tendency at universities to learn about theory and theoretical backgrounds, etc. I think we’re talked enough about that in terms of sustainability and the fact that you have a skill, which allows you to reduce energy, use materials wisely or understand how to select materials that aren’t toxic, I think that’s what’s very useful. The other thing that I think is healthy, architecture students tend to barricade themselves inside schools of architecture, the studio is important and they spend hours and hours on that in a lot of schools, what we’ve tried to do is introduce a range of courses to give students a wider experience and introduce topics that they wouldn’t normally come across in schools of architecture like environmental law or even workplace psychology.

Narrator: Finally, because many feel that sustainability will be achieved at the local and regional level, we asked Chris about the relationship the program has with the Washington DC community. He suggests that educational programs such as his are realizing the important role that local governments, associations, and individual citizens can play.

Christopher Grech: They are increasingly aware of that. Probably what they don’t realize is the value that students attribute to feedback, information from folks who are actually doing some of these things on a day-to-day basis or have some of their own expertise and knowledge. So I think everyone has a participate contribution to make and in a sense, don’t be shy, if you think you have some information or some aspect of your job or profession that you want someone else to know about, get in touch with us, because I think universities have to start becoming more plugged in to whatever’s going on outside.

About Christopher Grech

Associate Professor, The Catholic University of America’s School of Architecture and Planning

Professor Grech serves as the director of the Master of Science in Sustainable Design program and the Center for Building Stewardship. Grech completed his architectural studies at Liverpool University’s School of Architecture gaining B.A. (Hons) and B.Arch (Hons) degrees. He is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects and has practiced at some of the UK’s leading architectural and engineering practices such as Norman Foster & Partners, WilkinsonEyre Architects, Arup Associates and Whitby Bird and Partners. Grech also has extensive teaching experience at The University of Michigan and The University of North Carolina at Charlotte as well as Oxford Brookes University in UK.

Grech’s expertise lies in Construction Technology; he has co-authored two books on the subject: The Building Envelope and Connections. Both these books have been translated into German, Italian and Japanese and have won publishing awards. He has also edited “The Multilingual Dictionary of Architecture and Building Terms” and “Future Office: Design, Practice and Applied Research”. Grech was moderator of AIA DC’s 2030 Challenge Training Program in 2011 and 2012 and has served on the Education Coordinating Committee, Board of Direction, Building Enclosure Technology and Environment Council (BETEC).

From 2011 to 2013 Grech, together with faculty from the CUArch, Georgetown University and American University, headed up Harvest Home Team Capitol DC’s entry to the Department of Energy 2013 Solar Decathlon which finished in seventh place.